AJ developer interview

We talked about Blizzard's decision to hold no regionals, the new match ending mechanic "The Crowd Chose You!!!", the dispel cooldowns, rewards for 2v2, the win/loss statistics with the new 5.4 arena system and online tournaments like ArenaLeague.

After the interview Zilea, Novoz and Gothiques (ArenaLeague organisator) joined the call and we discussed the interview together.

Interview as MP3

Synopsis

The questions about the regionals not happening have been dodged by Holinka and GC. They agree that the lack of regionals is disappointing and later on GC wrote on Twitter that they knew the answers were disappointing but they are still in the process of deciding.

Arena participation, especially for alts, has increased in patch 5.3 due to catch-up mechanic.

A role check is implemented before arena queues can be initiated. This serves the protection against malicious players queueing up arenas without asking their group members first.

For now cross-server chats are not implemented. The idea is considered for the future to help finding players for cross-realm activities like rated battlegrounds, arenas, old raids, LFR or world bosses. They like the tools players use, like e.g. oQueue and OpenRaid.

Cross-realm PUG are less needed for high-rated players.

Arena statistics only show games played and wins, but not losses. Losing games on purpose, however, should have a penalty and the statistic serves this purpose.

97% of the arena games are less than 5 minutes long. Long turtle games can destroy the experience of an arena session. The match ending mechanic called "The Crowd Chose You!!!" is intended to make these matches shorter. Some things can only be tested on live. The mechanic will be monitored on live and evaluated further.

Regarding Battle Fatique: Tanks in raids have double the health of arena players and therefore a tuning mechanic is needed to tone down heals. Healing outpaces health pools, so constant adjustments are needed.

The game in 5.3 got to bursty and so base resilience got buffed. Numbers on PTR feel better than on live. The reason why base resilience is used, instead of resilience on gear, is that new players and alts got destroyed by geared players too fast. It improves the experience for lesser geared players.

The ArenaLeague tournament is something the developers like a lot. They also like the pick and ban system ArenaLeague uses, but it's unlikely to be implemented into the game. The devs want to support ArenaLeague and similar tournaments as well as the ArenaLive tournament UI.

Streaming increased a lot over the last 5 years. Twitch.tv now has 32 million viewers. They will explore ideas like adding streams to the new launcher in the future. This is not a feature promise of any kind.

The tools to track wintrading are being improved constantly. SC:2 does not have the problem of wintrading like WoW has.

Rank 1 titles will be granted for 3v3 and 5v5 for the next arena season but that may change in the future. They are still looking at 5v5 and are unsure in what direction to go.

No titles for 2v2 are planned. 2v2 does not need help as the participation is already high. 3v3, however, needs help so moving rewards from 3v3 to 2v2 might have bad consequences.

Seasonal based achievements are a good idea, but they might cause achievement bloat. They will not be included into 5.4.

Classes in World of Warcraft have too many abilities but removing abilities may alienate players.

Hotted and Swifty dev interview

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Want to play on the ArenaPass tournament realm?

The registration is still open. You can not only compete for a spot to the regional BlizzCon qualifiers but also win a Murloc pet and the Vanquisher title, have up to 11 fully geared characters for the arena and ride close to any mount you like. Also you can /wave into the livestream or say hello to the tournament players.

I don't understand... we get the opportunity for these "interviews" and like 0/10 questions are answered, the small discussion with Zilea and i think Nuvoz , correct me if i'm wrong, was 10x more beneficial and more constructive and time worthy then the interview with ghostcrawler the 1500 guy, his boyfriend brian the 1700 guy and then hildegard the guy who yelled in his mic the entire time, (just from what i observed)

The Starcraft community showed Blizzard how to turn SC2 into an eSports and its up to the WOW PVP community to do likewise.

major difference here is that the lead balance dev for starcraft 2 is actually a top level player (grandmasters random) which is why the game turned out as competitive as it is - there is a direct correlation between the skill of a lead balance dev at his game and how well balanced his game turns out (though they will always deny it).

point in case, the blizzard devs including GC had an event where they played battlegrounds against the community quite a while back and, as could be expected, they were horrible players. kalgan was borderline decent at one point at his mage, but there are certain concepts that ~2k players just wont grasp because to be at or below that rating in wotlk meant you fundamentally didnt understand how arena plays out and were simply starting to get a handle of how to play your character mechanically.

by contrast, the same week that the developer bg stomp was going on a HUGE balance whine circlejerk erupted on reddit starcraft where people declared zerg vs protoss unwinnable. I was watching the top ranked protoss player stream at the time, and david kim (lead sc2 balance dev) challenged him to a zvp, then proceeded to stomp him with some crazy multitasking nydus play.

people who don't play a game at a high level still often think they understand how it works, but they will never get the complete picture required to make good balance decisions.when i was learning WoW, each time I had a major breakthrough in my skill level/rating it was like i had re learned everything i thought i knew about the game. how can a game possibly turn out ok in the hands of someone who grasps the game as well as I did when I was just starting?

the direction of the game in the last couple years is a testament to the level understanding of the current balance devs, as wow arena slowly reaches a state that they can understand. I dont doubt that it will become a fairly balanced game at some point, but it wont be a game that anyone wants to play :/